Recent Tendencies in Ethics / Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

by W. R. Sorley

This solution can hardly be regarded as other than a counsel of despair. Its ethical value is merely apparent. What is of importance for ethics is not so much the presence of some ideal: it is the kind of ideal that matters. It is possible to have an ideal of selfishness as well as an ideal of love, a sensual ideal as well as a spiritual. Nietzsche's over-man is an ideal; the Mohammedan paradise is an ideal; and conduct can be modelled on them. But it is not enough to have system in conduct, irrespective of the worth of the ideal which determines the system. Some criterion is needed for deciding between competing ideals. As long as they are looked upon as mere illusions, as expressions of doubt, or as a hazard staked on the unknowable, caprice takes the place of law; where all is equally uncertain there is no security for the worth of the ideal itself.

Unsatisfactory as they are in this form, the opinions referred to are echoes of a pregnant doctrine of Kant's—the doctrine that the moral consciousness brings us into closer touch with reality than the merely theoretical reason can reach. Various lines of recent thought may be said to have been suggested by this view. Almost every idealist metaphysician has tended to look upon thought itself as constituting the inmost reality of the universe which it conceives or understands; and Kant's doctrine may make us pause and ask whether this tendency is not simply an assumption without warrant.

Again, the psychological analysis of knowledge has brought out the fact of its constant dependence upon practical interests. It is the need to perform or attain something, which is the motive that leads to the understanding of things; and the understanding of things with which alone we are satisfied is commonly that which helps us so to describe our experience as to be able to control some practical result. 'Knowledge is power'; and not only so, but in its early stages and in most of its later developments, knowledge is for power: it is for purposes of his own that man becomes the 'interpreter of nature.'

It is to men of science rather than to philosophers that we owe the 'descriptive theory' of scientific concepts which, within the last few years, has gone far to revolutionise the prevailing attitude of philosophy to science. Concepts, such as 'mass,' 'energy,' and the like, are no longer held to express realities the denial of which would be treason to science; they are simply descriptive notions whose truth consists in their utility: that is to say, in their ability to comprehend all the relevant facts in a simple description. And, in the same way, scientific principles are of the nature of postulates, whose justification is no necessary law of thought, but must rather be sought in the results of scientific investigation.

These three doctrines—the descriptive theory of science, the practical nature of knowledge as it is brought out by psychological analysis, and the special claims of the moral consciousness—have combined to bring about a tendency strongly opposed to the older idealist tradition, the tendency to regard practical results as the sole test of truth.

This conception is put forward now in philosophical literature as a new and independent point of view. The point of view is only in process of being hardened into a theory; but, under the name of Pragmatism, it has already become the subject of a vigorous propaganda. With the value of this doctrine as a general theory of reality we need not at present concern ourselves. In spite of the high claims it makes for the theoretical significance of moral ideas, its adherents have not as yet devoted much attention to the question of the worth of these moral ideas and the criteria by which that worth may be determined. Yet this surely is the fundamental question for ethical theory. On the other hand, as against a merely theoretical interpretation of the universe, into which the moral element enters only as a sort of loosely-connected appendix, the pragmatists are amply justified. Practical ends are prior to theoretical explanations of what happens. But practical ends vary, and some measure of their relative values is needed.

There is one thing which all reasoning about morality assumes and must assume; and that is morality itself. The moral concept—whether described as worth or as duty or as goodness—cannot be distilled out of any knowledge about the laws of existence or of occurrence. Nor will speculation about the real conditions of experience yield it, unless adequate recognition be first of all given to the fact that the experience which is the subject-matter of philosophy is not merely a sensuous and thinking, but also a moral, experience. The approval of the good, the disapproval of the evil, and the preference of the better: these would seem to be basal facts for an adequate philosophical theory: and they imply the striving for a best—however imperfect the apprehension of that best may always remain. Only when these facts—the characteristic facts of moral experience—are recognised as constituents of the experience which is our subject-matter, are we in a position profitably to enquire what is good and what evil, and how the best is to be conceived.

The recognition of these facts would only be a beginning; but it would be a beginning which would avoid the cardinal error fallen into not only by the leading exponents of evolutionist morality, but also to be found in much of the ethical work of idealist metaphysicians. It seems to have been assumed that moral principles can be reached by the application of scientific generalisations or of the results of a metaphysical analysis which has started by overlooking the facts of the moral consciousness. Even as a metaphysic this procedure is inadequate; and the interpretations of reality to which it has led have erred by over-intellectuality.

The systems of naturalism and of idealism, whose ethical consequences have been passed in review, have one feature in common; and it is a feature which from of old has been regarded as a mark of genuine philosophy. They both seek the One in the many; but they seek it on different roads. For the naturalist the most comprehensive description of things may be the conception of mass-points in motion; or it may be some more recondite conception to which physical analysis points. In either case the unity reached will be mechanical. For the idealist, on the other hand, reason may be said to be the central principle of things: the unity of reality is a rational unity. I have contended in these lectures that neither the mechanical unity of the naturalists nor the rational unity of the idealists has succeeded in comprehending within its unifying principle the essential nature of morality with its deep-going dualism of good and evil. But while I have maintained that even the conception of reality as the reproduction of itself by an eternal self-consciousness is an inadequate conception, it is still possible to hold that reality is a connected whole, and that its true principle of unity is an ethical principle.

If I were asked what is meant by an ethical unity, I should answer, in the first place, that it implies purpose. The unity of reality is not exhibited by a description of its present or past conditions or even by an account of its causal connexions. These modes of description are all affected by the fragmentariness which always belongs to temporal apprehension. But, when things are seen in the light of a purpose, a view of them as a whole becomes possible, and the fragmentariness of time is transcended. And, in the second place, I should say that an ethical unity implies the presence within itself of different finite centres of conscious activity, whose freedom is not inconsistent with their relation to one another and to the Whole.